LES 1: Modernism: an introduction
Core concepts: modern, modernity, Modernism
- Distinction between break vs. continuity in literary movements.
Rather than viewing movements (Romanticism Realism
Modernism Postmodernism) as radical breaks, they should be
seen as fluid interactions with porous borders. These “-isms” provide
scaffolding for discussing genre-specific characteristics
- Modern derives from Latin “modo” (current) and is highly polysemic,
referring to different periods depending on context – from the 16th
century onwards in general literature, or specifically to the late 19th
century avant-garde movement
- Modernity was 1st used by Baudelaire (1863) to describe the
fashionable, fleeting, and contingent in art, as opposed to the
eternal and immutable. The term remains imprecise, possibly
beginning with the Renaissance, the 17th-century scientific
revolutions, or as Foucault suggested, an attitude rather than an
epoch
Characteristics of modernity
- Anthropocentrism: human experience became the focal point
- Urbanization (by 1900): mass migration from countryside to city
created anonymous urban societies (Gesellschaft) replacing close-
knit rural communities (Gemeinschaft), as theorized by Ferdinand
Tönnies
- Technological progress brought revolutionary changes:
o Photography (Kodak camera, 1888) transformed how people
perceived time
o Electric motors, diesel engines, Ford’s Model T and assembly
line production
o Communication technologies: gramophone, radio,
cinematograph, X-rays
o Transportation: automobiles, airplanes, motor buses
Responses to progress
- The assembly line (depicted in Chaplin’s Modern Times, 1936)
symbolized alienation and fragmentation – humans reduced to
insignificant cogs in a vast machine, losing connection to the end
product
- Architectural Modernism (Le Corbusier) emphasized symmetry,
straight lines, functionality, and rejection of ornament, representing
a radical break from Victorian styles
- Responses to technological progress varied:
, o Celebratory: Marinetti’s Futurism praised “the beauty of
speed”
o Despairing/apocalyptic: most Anglophone literary Modernism
(Eliot, Yeats, Pound)
Pioneering thinkers
- Charles Darwin (1809-1882): evolution through natural selection
questioned divine creation, presented humans as just another
species, and influenced Social Darwinism, eugenics, and colonial
justifications
- Karl Marx (1818-1883): capitalism thrives on crises, destabilizes
society, causes alienation, and destroys old values through its
egalitarian nature
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): declared “God is dead”, developed
the Übermensch concept, and distinguished between Apollonian
(rational) and Dionysian (pleasure-driven) experiences
- Sigmund Freud (1856—1939): developed psychoanalysis, positioned
the ego between id and super-ego, and argued society requires
repression of (sexual) desire. Free association technique paralleled
William James’s of consciousness
- Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913): established that language is
arbitrary and socially constructed, with words meaningful only in
relation to each other – basis for structuralism and semiotics
- Henri Bergson (1859-1941): distinguished between chronological
time (clocks) and duration (personal, subjective time) – influencing
works like Mrs. Dalloway
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955): Theory of Relativity overturned
Newtonians physics, introducing contingency and observer-
dependent reality, which influenced narrative techniques (multiple
focalization, unreliable narrators, subjectivity)
Defining Modernism
- As period: approximately 1890-1930, with 1922 as the “annus
mirabilis” (Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Joyce’s Ulysses, Mansfield’s
“The Garden Party”)
- As genre: characterized by innovation, experimentation, formal
complexity, elliptical style, self-reflexivity, apocalyptic tone, and
uncertainty of reality
- As model (Norman Cantor, 1988):
o Anti-historicism (history not progressive)
o Focus on individual microcosm vs social macrocosm
o Self-referential (art about itself)
o Disjointed and disintegrated
, o Focus on aesthetics over Victorian morality
Modernism and history
- Anti-historical tendencies: Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses calls history
“a nightmare from which I am trying to awake"
- Marxist critique (Georg Lukács): Modernism presents humans as
solitary, asocial, ahistorical beings without personal development or
pre-existent reality
- Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno): Modernism attempts to change
society through shockingly radical art forms
Modernism vs Realism
- Realism aimed for verisimilitude and was once innovative in
portraying individual experience. Over time, it became associated
with emphasis on society rather than individual inner lives
- Modernism challenged this: Virginia Woolf asked “Is life like this?
Must novels be like this?” (1919), arguing for rendering human
subjectivity in ways “more real than realism”
- Joyce’s “new realism”: in Ulysses, Joyce claimed to have opened a
new way of thinking and writing, replacing “romantic classicism”
(formal realism) with modernist techniques that those who don’t
follow “are going to be left behind”
- Modernism represents both a response to the crisis of modernity
and “the tradition of the new” – a paradoxical innovation that
becomes its own tradition
LES 2: Modernism: an introduction + Katherine Mansfield, ‘The
Garden Party’ (1922)
Modernism vs Realism: what changes?
- Modernism as a challenge to (especially 19th-century) Realism.
Realism assumes a broadly shared external world that society
perceives in roughly similar ways. Modernist writers and critics push
back against this assumption by insisting that reality is plural and
subjective, because it is filtered through individual perception. In
other words, experience is not “one world, one meaning”, but “many
worlds” shaped by different minds
- Modernism is summarized through 2 guiding imperatives:
o “Make it new” (Ezra Pound, 1928): modernism aims to modify
or overturn existing modes of representation, which leads to
formal experimentation and innovation
, o “Look within” (Virginia Woolf, 1919): modernism shifts
attention toward the inner life of individuals, especially how
consciousness processes daily life
- These slogans are not treated as simple opposites. “Make it new”
involves innovation, but also a complex relationship to tradition.
Joyce’s intertextuality (e.g., Ulysses) as an example where
modernist novelty can be built through dense reworking of existing
texts and cultural traditions
“Look within” and Woolf’s idea of modern fiction
- Woolf’s essay Modern Fiction is used to clarify what “looking within”
means:
o Woolf argues that writers should examine “an ordinary mind
on an ordinary day”
o She criticizes “neo-realists” (like Bennett and Galsworthy) for
focusing on what she calls “unimportant things” and for being
concerned “not with the spirit but with the body”
o For Woolf, the novelist’s true task is to convey the mind’s
“varying, unknown, uncircumscribed spirit” as purely as
possible, with minimal intrusion from “alien” external
description
- This sets up the common narrative that modernism equals an
“inward turn”, meaning a move away from social environment and
toward private consciousness
The “inward turn” as a critical concept (and why it is debated)
- The “inward turn” as a term associated with Erich von Kahler (1957-
59). It is define (via Herman, 2011) as:
o A movement away from characters’ environments (as spaces
for action and interaction)
o Toward a domain of the mental or psychological
o Conceived as an interior space separated from external
material reality
- Important clarifications:
o Herman (and also Woolf) did not coin the phrase
o Kahler’s inquiry is not specifically about modernist fiction; it
concerns the novel as a genre more broadly
o Kahler’s study ends with Tristram Shandy, which complicates
the idea that inwardness is uniquely “modernist”
o Despite these nuances, “inward turn” has become a critical
commonplace in modernist studies: modernism is often
Core concepts: modern, modernity, Modernism
- Distinction between break vs. continuity in literary movements.
Rather than viewing movements (Romanticism Realism
Modernism Postmodernism) as radical breaks, they should be
seen as fluid interactions with porous borders. These “-isms” provide
scaffolding for discussing genre-specific characteristics
- Modern derives from Latin “modo” (current) and is highly polysemic,
referring to different periods depending on context – from the 16th
century onwards in general literature, or specifically to the late 19th
century avant-garde movement
- Modernity was 1st used by Baudelaire (1863) to describe the
fashionable, fleeting, and contingent in art, as opposed to the
eternal and immutable. The term remains imprecise, possibly
beginning with the Renaissance, the 17th-century scientific
revolutions, or as Foucault suggested, an attitude rather than an
epoch
Characteristics of modernity
- Anthropocentrism: human experience became the focal point
- Urbanization (by 1900): mass migration from countryside to city
created anonymous urban societies (Gesellschaft) replacing close-
knit rural communities (Gemeinschaft), as theorized by Ferdinand
Tönnies
- Technological progress brought revolutionary changes:
o Photography (Kodak camera, 1888) transformed how people
perceived time
o Electric motors, diesel engines, Ford’s Model T and assembly
line production
o Communication technologies: gramophone, radio,
cinematograph, X-rays
o Transportation: automobiles, airplanes, motor buses
Responses to progress
- The assembly line (depicted in Chaplin’s Modern Times, 1936)
symbolized alienation and fragmentation – humans reduced to
insignificant cogs in a vast machine, losing connection to the end
product
- Architectural Modernism (Le Corbusier) emphasized symmetry,
straight lines, functionality, and rejection of ornament, representing
a radical break from Victorian styles
- Responses to technological progress varied:
, o Celebratory: Marinetti’s Futurism praised “the beauty of
speed”
o Despairing/apocalyptic: most Anglophone literary Modernism
(Eliot, Yeats, Pound)
Pioneering thinkers
- Charles Darwin (1809-1882): evolution through natural selection
questioned divine creation, presented humans as just another
species, and influenced Social Darwinism, eugenics, and colonial
justifications
- Karl Marx (1818-1883): capitalism thrives on crises, destabilizes
society, causes alienation, and destroys old values through its
egalitarian nature
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): declared “God is dead”, developed
the Übermensch concept, and distinguished between Apollonian
(rational) and Dionysian (pleasure-driven) experiences
- Sigmund Freud (1856—1939): developed psychoanalysis, positioned
the ego between id and super-ego, and argued society requires
repression of (sexual) desire. Free association technique paralleled
William James’s of consciousness
- Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913): established that language is
arbitrary and socially constructed, with words meaningful only in
relation to each other – basis for structuralism and semiotics
- Henri Bergson (1859-1941): distinguished between chronological
time (clocks) and duration (personal, subjective time) – influencing
works like Mrs. Dalloway
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955): Theory of Relativity overturned
Newtonians physics, introducing contingency and observer-
dependent reality, which influenced narrative techniques (multiple
focalization, unreliable narrators, subjectivity)
Defining Modernism
- As period: approximately 1890-1930, with 1922 as the “annus
mirabilis” (Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Joyce’s Ulysses, Mansfield’s
“The Garden Party”)
- As genre: characterized by innovation, experimentation, formal
complexity, elliptical style, self-reflexivity, apocalyptic tone, and
uncertainty of reality
- As model (Norman Cantor, 1988):
o Anti-historicism (history not progressive)
o Focus on individual microcosm vs social macrocosm
o Self-referential (art about itself)
o Disjointed and disintegrated
, o Focus on aesthetics over Victorian morality
Modernism and history
- Anti-historical tendencies: Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses calls history
“a nightmare from which I am trying to awake"
- Marxist critique (Georg Lukács): Modernism presents humans as
solitary, asocial, ahistorical beings without personal development or
pre-existent reality
- Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno): Modernism attempts to change
society through shockingly radical art forms
Modernism vs Realism
- Realism aimed for verisimilitude and was once innovative in
portraying individual experience. Over time, it became associated
with emphasis on society rather than individual inner lives
- Modernism challenged this: Virginia Woolf asked “Is life like this?
Must novels be like this?” (1919), arguing for rendering human
subjectivity in ways “more real than realism”
- Joyce’s “new realism”: in Ulysses, Joyce claimed to have opened a
new way of thinking and writing, replacing “romantic classicism”
(formal realism) with modernist techniques that those who don’t
follow “are going to be left behind”
- Modernism represents both a response to the crisis of modernity
and “the tradition of the new” – a paradoxical innovation that
becomes its own tradition
LES 2: Modernism: an introduction + Katherine Mansfield, ‘The
Garden Party’ (1922)
Modernism vs Realism: what changes?
- Modernism as a challenge to (especially 19th-century) Realism.
Realism assumes a broadly shared external world that society
perceives in roughly similar ways. Modernist writers and critics push
back against this assumption by insisting that reality is plural and
subjective, because it is filtered through individual perception. In
other words, experience is not “one world, one meaning”, but “many
worlds” shaped by different minds
- Modernism is summarized through 2 guiding imperatives:
o “Make it new” (Ezra Pound, 1928): modernism aims to modify
or overturn existing modes of representation, which leads to
formal experimentation and innovation
, o “Look within” (Virginia Woolf, 1919): modernism shifts
attention toward the inner life of individuals, especially how
consciousness processes daily life
- These slogans are not treated as simple opposites. “Make it new”
involves innovation, but also a complex relationship to tradition.
Joyce’s intertextuality (e.g., Ulysses) as an example where
modernist novelty can be built through dense reworking of existing
texts and cultural traditions
“Look within” and Woolf’s idea of modern fiction
- Woolf’s essay Modern Fiction is used to clarify what “looking within”
means:
o Woolf argues that writers should examine “an ordinary mind
on an ordinary day”
o She criticizes “neo-realists” (like Bennett and Galsworthy) for
focusing on what she calls “unimportant things” and for being
concerned “not with the spirit but with the body”
o For Woolf, the novelist’s true task is to convey the mind’s
“varying, unknown, uncircumscribed spirit” as purely as
possible, with minimal intrusion from “alien” external
description
- This sets up the common narrative that modernism equals an
“inward turn”, meaning a move away from social environment and
toward private consciousness
The “inward turn” as a critical concept (and why it is debated)
- The “inward turn” as a term associated with Erich von Kahler (1957-
59). It is define (via Herman, 2011) as:
o A movement away from characters’ environments (as spaces
for action and interaction)
o Toward a domain of the mental or psychological
o Conceived as an interior space separated from external
material reality
- Important clarifications:
o Herman (and also Woolf) did not coin the phrase
o Kahler’s inquiry is not specifically about modernist fiction; it
concerns the novel as a genre more broadly
o Kahler’s study ends with Tristram Shandy, which complicates
the idea that inwardness is uniquely “modernist”
o Despite these nuances, “inward turn” has become a critical
commonplace in modernist studies: modernism is often
